But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.
But the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.
But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed...
And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from ou...
I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.
That is the point of white supremacy—to ensure that that which all others achieve with maximal effort, white people (and particularly white men) achieve with minimal qualification. Barack Obama delive...
Love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. And I could no longer predict where I would find my heroes.
Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?
This is how we lose our softness. This is how they steal our right to smile. No one told those little white children, with their tricycles, to be twice as good. I imagined their parents telling them t...
Think of your mother, who had no father. And your grandmother, who was abandoned by her father. And your grandfather, who was left behind by his father. And think of how Prince's daughter was now draf...
These were the injuries, among any others, that Sologon- the so-called Buffalo Woman- was made to carry. But every dart endured, every torture tolerated, tempered her. Sologon grew strong. Ruthless. H...
There was nothing holy or particular in my skin; I was black because of history and heritage. There was no nobility in falling, in being bound, in living oppressed, and there was no inherent meaning i...
The meek shall inherit the earth meant nothing to me. The meek were battered in West Baltimore, stomped out at Walbrook Junction, bashed up on Park Heights, and raped in the showers of the city jail....
The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud ruden...
Or l'insécurité ne fait que mettre des bornes à ta perception de la galaxie.
Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so ce...
No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.
Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.
My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue.
I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else's chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that withi...